Alongside john mills, carol white stars as a young woman whose determined efforts to escape a life of rural poverty lead to complications and worse. Dulcima, a pretty girl treated as a drudge by her family, lifts herself from her environment by becoming housekeeper to parker, a curmudgeonly widower living in drunken disarray on a neighbouring farm. When she sees the amount of money he has stashed around the place, dulcima is happy enough to indulge his growing desire for her, and a strange, yet mutually beneficial, relationship develops. But a handsome young gamekeeper, newly arrived on a nearby estate, also catches dulcima s eye...